Friday, 20 September 2013

Another birthday party beer, again half to jerrycan and half bottled. This time a wheat, for no other reason than the quick turnaround. I forget what the gravity ended up as, but it was under target. We decided not to do anything about that though. Also, I would have chucked some oranges in this but forgot to buy them. We'll chuck some slices in at the party.

I'm not sure why, possibly because I destroyed my decent thermometer somehow, but the next couple of beers both came out 10 points under the gravity that I was aiming for. Either that or I messed up the recipe creation in BeerSmith2.

I decided to do a more classic British pale ale, mainly to use up a packet of Fuggles, if I'm honest. This was also destined for the 40th birthday party, however, in the end we decided to bottle and keep half of it. There was a sugar addition to this, but Daz did it at fermenting time, so I'm not sure exactly what he added.

The birthday party beers have been put back into jerrycans. The idea being that we'll syphon into another jerrycan after they've settled and serve from that. I have some taps that should be OK for serving. I know this isn't exactly ideal, but it was the best we could come up with with limited time and resources.

I had quite a lot of wheat malt left and not that much of anything else, so I started casting around to look for articles/posts about doing a 100% wheat. There was a lot of 'thou shalt not do this' style talk, mainly centering around stuck mashes and the like. Well, since we do brew in a bag I figured that wouldn't be an issue.

5kg Wheat malt

36g Hallertauer Northern Brewer @ 60

30g Bobek @ 10

Mash at 66.7 for 60 minutes

This had an additional random couple of litres of water chucked in as it was coming up to the boil, a 90 minute boil and an additional litre of water to compensate for evaporative loss. OG 1043.

I haven't kept this blog up to date with recent brewing. Naughty me.
A while ago we made wort for a smoked amber lager which, for one reason or another, has sat in jerrycans for ages. We're kind of ready to ferment it now - this will be our first lager since we used to do kits ages ago.